Thoughts in a Haystack

Okay, so I'm reading Richard Dawkins' The God Delusion and, for the most part, I want to wait until I have finished the book before I comment, so as to reduce the possibility that whatever I criticize isn't clarified or changed later on in the text. Still, this one is well enough known and independent of Dawkins himself that I think it is ripe for discussion. I'm talking about Bertrand Russell's orbiting teapot example of the alleged burden of proof concerning religious claims that is adopted with a vengence by Dawkins.

I'll remind anyone who may stumble in here that I am a militantly apathetic agnostic and a fervent apatheist. Nothing here should be interpreted as an argument in favor of God's existence. Dawkins, for whatever reason, feels almost as much or more antipathy for agnostics as he does for theists. He at least announces a policy of not going out of his way to offend theists (whether or not he adheres to it is another matter) but has no qualms about inventing a (strained) acronym for agnosticism as PAP (Permanent Agnosticism in Principle). In any event, Russell's argument is well known:

Many orthodox people speak as though it were the business of sceptics to disprove received dogmas rather than of dogmaticists to prove them. If I were to suggest that between the Earth and Mars there is a china teapot revolving about the sun in an elliptical orbit, nobody would be able to disprove my assertion provided I were careful to add that the teapot is too small to be revealed even by our most powerful telescopes. But if I were to go on to say that, since my assertion cannot be disproved, it is an intolerable presumption on the part of human reason to doubt it, I should rightly be thought to be talking nonsense. If, however, the existence of such a teapot were affirmed in ancient books, taught as the sacred truth every Sunday, and instilled into the minds of children at school, hesitation to believe in its existence would become a mark of eccentricity and entitle the doubter to the attentions of the psychiatrist in an enlightened age or of the Inquisitor in an earlier time.

According to Dawkins, "we would not hesitate to declare our strong belief that there is positively no orbiting teapot." And, indeed, it might well be the impulse of anyone to say that it is unlikely that there is a peculiarly human object like a teapot in orbit in deep space ... given what we empirically know about space flight and how such an object might get into orbit. There is much evidence showing how hard it is to launch things into space and there have been relatively few launches into the area between Earth and Mars. Furthermore, between the motivations for those launches, which leave little room for things like teapots, and our actual records of the contents of such flights, we may well dismiss the likelihood on empiric grounds. In short, Russell, and Dawkins after him, have, by their choice of object, not only imported, sub rosa, a standard of evidence -- empiricism -- to apply to the issue but a standard we can already meet.

Just for starters, what if what was being proposed was the existence in orbit between Mars and Earth of something like the monolith of Arthur C. Clarke and Stanley Kubrick? In other words, what if it was proposed that an apparently created object of unknown origin was located there? Is the case for dismissing the possibility out of hand as compelling then? It certainly wouldn't be to me and the difference results from sneaking hidden premises into the original example. A term sometimes used for such argumentation is "cheap rhetoric."

John Wilkins gives an excellent explanation of agnosticism to counter Dawkins' strawman in the comments to this post at Larry Moran's Sandwalk. But I'm not really interested in that part of the debate here.

Instead, I want to focus on the notion of burdens of proof as they are usually used in these debates. People frequently assert various burdens of proof along Dawkins' and Russell's lines but rarely attempt to actually justify them. I would argue that the only burden that really exists (outside of socially imposed ones, such as those in the law, intended to attain specific social goals) is an initial burden of going forward.

In any debate, there must be a starting point, some issue to be discussed. One side must propose the issue and either provide some evidence for the reality of the issue or else a reason to discuss it as an abstract. It seems to me that this is a minimal burden and, once met, can either be thought of as dropping away or, perhaps more correctly, as a starting point for constant shifting burdens as each side makes new assertions and as new subsidiary issues are raised. Otherwise, the alleged burdens are just a rhetorical device to justify ignoring the opponent's evidence and arguments.

Let's go back to Russell's teapot example, as flawed as it is. What evidence would be needed to meet the burden of going forward proposed by Russell? Let's say, in the happy day when a manned spacecraft is making its way to Mars from Earth, one member of the crew, idly looking out a port, sees what seems to him something mighty like a teapot (perhaps with a Soviet red star on it).

The radar was not aimed in that direction at the time and there was no chance to take a picture before it was gone. In short, the only evidence is the astronaut's report. Still, an astronaut is presumably someone with some training in correct observation and someone who has undergone no little vetting for stability. More importantly, if one person's unconfirmed observation is not sufficient to meet the initial burden, why not? Other than dismissing the evidence out of hand (nothing more than an unsupported rhetorical move) any protesting of the quality or the import of the evidence is, itself, an assertion of a subsidiary issue that needs a reason for going forward on. For example, saying that the crew member was under stress and hallucinated the teapot must meet its own burden of showing that, not only was the astronaut under pressure, but was hallucinating and that the teapot was part of his or her [cough] delusion. At the very least, based on this scant evidence, the teapot would pass into Dawkins' temporary agnosticism, pending some compelling evidence that the teapot didn't exist.

Need it be pointed out that billions of people, many of them intelligent and otherwise clearly rational, have reported having a personal experience of God? I await with bated breath the evidence that atheists will use to meet their burden of showing that such reports are all false and/or that God doesn't exist ...
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